


Blind Lead the Blind

by Camorra



Category: Durarara!!
Genre: Depression, Disabled Character, M/M, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-29
Updated: 2018-03-29
Packaged: 2019-04-14 16:49:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,387
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14140293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Camorra/pseuds/Camorra
Summary: The only fight Shizuo's ever lost before was against his anger.It's ironic that he lost the one that counted most.





	Blind Lead the Blind

**Author's Note:**

> inspired by the tumblr post that shizuo loses the ketsu battle. if i could find it, i'd link it, i swear.

He can hear Kasuka come home even before he opens the door, his footsteps distinct and precise on the linoleum floor. It doesn’t stop Kasuka from announcing himself, the door swinging in on creaking hinges and the brief shuffle as Kasuka toes off his shoes. Shizuo’s managed to maneuver himself to the couch, has been laying there for however many minutes, hours. He can’t tell. Time has a molasses-like quality that stretches each moment into a thousand, but passes far more quickly than he would think.

“I’m home,” Kasuka says, and Shizuo hears a sharp _click._

“How was work?”

“It was fine. What do you want for dinner?”

“Whatever’s fine. I’m not hungry.”

There’s a pause as Kasuka walks by the couch, bare feet sticking slightly to the wood floors.

“You did the dishes,” Kasuka says. “You don’t have to. We have the dishwasher.”

But he had wanted to. It killed time, gave him something to do. He had run his fingers carefully over every inch, looking for spots of dried on food, scrubbing until the palms of his hands were numb and wrinkled from the water.

It might have taken hours.

It might have taken fifteen minutes.

He’s not sure and he doesn’t really care.

Kasuka’s silent. He’s not a man of many words at the best of times, but lately he’s been even quieter. Shizuo can hear sounds of something being made, pots clanging as Kasuka pulls one out of the cabinet. There’s the sound of plastic scraping the bottom of the pot.

It’s almost soothing to have another person banging around. It gives the space a defined depth, not an endless yawn of space.

He doesn’t know what to say to his brother anymore. Not that they used to talk a whole lot, but still. Kasuka won’t talk about his current projects, or his girlfriend.

No, Kasuka only wants to talk about _Shizuo._

“How are you feeling today?” Kasuka says over dinner. It’s some sort of pasta. Something with cheese that’s probably out of a meal helper kit because Shizuo knows Kasuka isn’t really that great of a cook.

He remembers being sick exactly once in the entirety of his childhood, a flu.

It was before he could lift a fridge over his head, and Kasuka made him soup, because that’s what you did.

He remembers it vividly. The singed and chemical smell of burning metal, the bright red splatter of tomato soup on the floor, the ceiling. The smoking remains of the can still sitting on the stove.

And in the middle of it all, Kasuka, covered in tomato soup looking his brother dead in the eye as if to challenge him.

“You’re smiling.” It’s not accusatory, but it feels that way.

“Yeah.” Shizuo takes a bite of pasta. “Remember when you tried to make me tomato soup? And you blew up the can cause you put it right on the stove?”

“No. You don’t like tomato soup.”

“Yeah, well. Nevermind.”

“Okay.”

 

Celty comes to visit once.

He knows it’s her because she smells like grass after rain, like the sea against cliffs, like freshly turned dirt.

She also barely makes a sound.

There’s the tapping on her PDA, but she ghosts over the floor, the only indication Shizuo has that’s she’s moved is the noises things make as they clatter and shift.

“Thanks for coming,” Shizuo says to empty air. “And thanks for. You know.”

There’s silence, and increasingly harried sounds of flesh hitting glass of the PDA.

Shizuo jumps when a cold, impersonal voice rings through the flat. “Don’t worry about it. How are you holding up?”

Each word is separate from the next, lacking the flow of natural speech. It’s altogether jarring and feels wrong.

“I’m doing fine.”

He can’t tell if he imagines it, or if he can really feel the disbelief rolling off Celty in waves.

“If you ever need to talk, I’m here,” the robotic voice says.

“Thanks,” Shizuo says, because he doesn’t know what else to say, and partly because he can feel the sentiment behind it. The genuine concern. It’s refreshing after the professional but distant care of doctors.

Celty stays a while, just being. And it’s fantastic, really. There’s no pressure to keep up a conversation he doesn’t want to have, and she’s soothing. Something about her seems to say that the world is as it should be, even if she defies the laws of it simply by existing.

But eventually, she does have to leave. She has other things to do, other friends to attend to.

She tries to come once a week, but she’s busy. And he never leaves, trapped within the walls of Kasuka’s apartment.

He tried to leave once, by himself.

He’d make it out of the front door, two steps out of the main lobby.

He gets it, really, Tokyo is a busy place. He can’t expect everyone to immediately move out of his way. But that doesn’t change that someone bumps into him, and he can’t help it, he throws an arm out.

He’s not sure who he hit.

He’s not sure what happened to them.

All he knows is there were gasps and talk of an ambulance and the copper scent of blood.

He hasn’t left since then.

 

Sometimes, he dreams.

It’s odd, because he can dream with pictures and sights and _see_ things.

He’ll be dreaming Kasuka as twenty for the rest of his life, because he’ll never know any different. Immortal in his memories.

Sometimes, the dreams are pleasant.

Sometimes he dreams sunny days where the dogs talk to him or he has to pick this one flower _or else_ or a mountain becomes a meadow with a thousand tiny wildflowers and a waterslide appears to take him to McDonalds.

Sometimes, he dreams rooftops and flames.

Sometimes, he dreams his lungs are being crushed from the lack of air, that he’s sluggish and his body won’t respond as he pounds the rooftop feebly, and he can feel the warmth of this skin burning, but there’s no _pain,_ only the smell of charred flesh.

The flames die down, but he can’t _move,_ increasingly desperate pleas that his body won’t respond to.

In his dreams, Izaya’s footstep ring like gunshots, like an announcement of doom and death.

In his dreams, Izaya looms over him nine feet tall, and his knife is a meter long of gleaming metal and the dying flames reflect in his eyes and cast shadows over his face.

In his dreams, Izaya is beautiful, with porcelain skin and blood red eyes and each eyelash rendered with precision and care, a divine sort of creation.

In his dreams, Izaya’s voice is beautiful and melodic and he says to Shizuo, _“Inhumanitas omni aetate molesta est_.”

In his dreams, Shizuo can watch as the last thing he sees is Izaya’s smile as the blade comes down.

Shinra told him, when he first woke up and demanded and demand and demanded that the lights be turned on, that the human brain doesn’t allow pain to be recorded. He can remember all he wants, but he can’t _feel_ it again.

Shinra’s a damn fucking liar that never went to medical school, what does he know? Shizuo swears that he can _still_ feel the blade go through his eye, a burning sort of pain like he’s never felt before, not even when he was breaking bones every damn week.

The other one.

They told him the other one was gouged out, completely severed. The nerve roughly severed with _something._ Celty said there wasn’t a spare eye rolling around the roof when she found him, and he’s inclined to believe her.

Not like he can tell for himself.

He knows that dreams aren’t reality.

Izaya’s not inhumanly beautiful, not nine feet tall. Izaya didn’t _really_ say that.

Izaya probably doesn’t even know Latin, it’s a dead language, after all. Not very useful. He’s probably not covered with eyes either, like he sometimes is when Shizuo dreams.

But who knows. Shizuo hasn’t heard from him. Maybe he really is the avenging angel Shizuo dreams, here to strike down the unholy monster.

It’s really too bad that he didn’t quite finish.

 

It’s not that Kasuka’s _never_ home, it’s just that he’s rarely home, and Shizuo has no idea what to do with himself.

Before, he would sleep.

He’d pass the hours that way, because it was easy and he didn’t know what else to do.

Sometimes, he’d get hungry and wander into the kitchen to make food, but he’d hit his toe on the door or knock everything out of the fridge looking for milk and Kasuka would pad in and say: “Brother, what are you doing? It’s three in the morning.”

It’s after the fifth time that Kasuka has to shake him awake for dinner that Kasuka buys him an alarm clock, one that sounds once at ten to tell him to go to bed and another at eight to tell him to wake up.

Shizuo threw it at the wall once, but that’s all it took, and he could tell by the sounds that the pieces of it made as it bounced and clattered that it’d made a pretty decent mess.

The guilt’s what really drove him out of bed, feet landing on some of the remnants of the alarm clock as he went to look for the broom.

He’s not sure how long he looks, but it feels like forever and he comes to the conclusion that Kasuka just doesn’t have one.

Kasuka finds him hours later crawling on the floor, searching for pieces of the clock.

He misses most of them.

“Are your feet okay?” is what Kasuka asks, because Shizuo doesn’t deserve a brother like him.

“Fine.”

“Okay.”

And apparently Kasuka _does_ have a broom, because he can hear the soft swish of bristles on the floor and the clatter of things hitting each other as they clatter together.

Shizuo can sleep uninterrupted after that, long days and long night pass with the only indication of time being Kasuka coming and going.

Until he can’t sleep like that anymore.

“Brother,” Kasuka says between scrapes of his chopstick in his bowl. Shizuo uses a fork, because hunting down food and then clutching it delicately between two sticks to lift it into the air to his mouth was just.

Disastrous.

He wonders if his shirts have stains.

He supposes it doesn’t matter. The only one that sees him anymore is Kasuka.

“Brother,” Kasuka says again.

“What?”

“I think you need to get help.”

Shizuo stabs his next piece of stir-fry a little harder than he means too, and he can hear the crack of porcelain.

“I’ll manage.”

“Having depression is nothing to be ashamed of,” Kasuka says, and his voice is normally flat and monotone, but these words don’t sound like him. They sound like a pamphlet. “You’ve been through something traumatic and—”

“I brought this upon myself.”

“You didn’t--”

“I _did._ I started this. All of it. _I_ started the fight, _I_ did that. Fuck, _I’m_ the one that threw the first punch. _I’m_ the one that made this _violent.”_

“Brother--”

“I _deserve_ this. I _lost.”_

“You do not—”

Shizuo pushes away from the table, and there’s so much noise he can’t quite tell _what_ exactly goes flying, but a lot of it does but he doesn’t care.

His hip hits the edge of the counter as he leaves the kitchen and he hits his shoulder on a door frame and he knows he sounds like an elephant in a china shop but he can’t stop and--

Anyway.

He doesn’t sleep to pass the time anymore.

Sometimes he turns on the TV, fingers skipping over the plastic buttons on the side of Kasuka’s fancy flat screen. Half the time, he can’t figure out what the hell’s even going on in whatever trite day drama goes on, the visual cues that make the story lost to him. Sometimes, the electric whine of the TV makes him turn it off before it’s even properly warmed up, too on edge to deal with that.

But most days, he leaves it on, just to hear the voices.

It gives the illusion that he’s not here all alone, and that’s a comfort, even if it’s a flimsy one.

It’s a daytime talk show, and it sounds like four women talking about the pro’s and con’s of this vacuum over that one, and it’s easy to tune out and let it flow over him.

“— _Yuuhei.”_

What?

_“Is he really taking a break from the screen?”_

_“That’s what he announced earlier. Shocking, isn’t it?”_

_“He cited some ‘family issues.’ My money is that he got Hajime Ruri knocked up—”_

 

Getting out of the apartment isn't the issue. That's relatively simple. The door’s twelve steps from the couch. The lock is at eye level. The elevator is at the end of the hall, but the stairs are somewhere near there, too.

He fumbles until he finds the door, knows it’s a stairwell by the way his breath echoes in the space.

He takes the stairs several at a time. If he wasn’t him, he might have broken his ankles. But if he wasn’t him, he wouldn’t be in this mess.

He wouldn’t be a strain on everyone around him, because he’d be dead.

He stumbles through the lobby, out the front door. Everything outside is a riot of noise and smell, and he turns right, because he thinks he vaguely remembers a station being that way. Vaguely.

He stumbles through the streets of Tokyo, relying on the sounds of strangers to know when to cross a street, when to stop. His shoulders climb higher and higher towards his ears, and he wants to go back and hide in Kasuka’s apartment.

But that’s not really an option.

The station is louder than he remembers, click clack of high heads bouncing off the walls and combining with the low murmur of conversations and the rumble of trains and the squeaks of a hundred thousand things brushing against each other.

And the smell. The overwhelming crush of bodies and a thousand perfumes and deodorants and the sickly sweet smell of trash and rot and the sterile smell of chlorine under it all

He doesn't know what station it is. He t _hinks_ it’s Meijijingu-mae, but he can't be sure. It could just as easily be Harajuku itself. He never really thought to leave Ikebukuro, there was never a need. Never a want, really. Harajuku was always filled with those idiots dressed in all sort of ridiculous clothes, right? Far too close to Shinjuku, anyway. He respects boundaries even if others seem compulsively unable.

But it doesn’t really matter what station it is as long as he can get on a train.

There’s just.

One problem.

He finds the machines to buy his ticket with a walloping glob of luck and a vague idea of how stations are laid out, but.

He can’t see the screen.

And it’s a touch screen.

Fuck.

You can guess, right? They can’t differ that much from place to place, right? He manages by poking it until the machine gives into his sheer persistence and spits out a ticket. Where it goes, he doesn't know.

Doesn't really care.

He shuffles off to what he really hopes is main terminal, choosing a direction at random and gently feeling with his foot until he hits stairs, carefully, carefully taking them a step at a time.

But there's one more step than he expects and he stumbles, hands flailing and sense of the world yanked from under him.

But it’s not the ground he hits.

It’s something warm and decently sold, something covered with cloth that bunches and pulls when he scrabbles for purchase.

Something that smells cloyingly sweet, but with something sharp underneath. Something a little like sweat and…vanilla?

“I’m sorry,” he’s saying, and his voice sounds far too loud to his own ears, so he tries again, quieter. “Sorry.”

“Ah, it’s no trouble, ne? We all have bad days.” The voice that haunts his dreams. That’s familiar to him as the back of his hand.

“Izaya.”

“Have we…oh. You look different with brown hair, Shizu-chan. I didn’t recognize you, you look almost human.” Izaya…doesn’t sound pleased. Or mad. He actually sounds…almost bored.

Shizuo tightens his grip in Izaya’s jacket. “What are you doing here, flea?”

“I live around here, you see. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I really do have things to be doing—”

“No.”

“Pardon?”

“I said no.” Shizuo licks his lips. “Finish what you started for once, flea.”

“What’s this, what’s this? You bumped into me, not the other way around.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about and you _know_ it.”

“I’m not following your protozoan logic, I’m afraid. You’re going to have to spell it out.”

Shizuo can feel the fabric rip under his fingers. “I’m _saying_ that you need to finish what you fucking started and fucking _kill me_.”

 

Izaya leads him…somewhere.

The ambient sound gets quieter, less. He can still hear the click-clack of other people walking by, but it’s fairly rare.

Izaya is surprisingly good at this, walking at a steady pace and pushing or pulling gently on Shizuo’s arm, depending.

Shizuo doesn’t eat a face full of concrete, or a metal telephone pole like he expects to. It’s almost pleasant, if he was hair-raisingly aware of the person next to him.

“I grew up near here,” Izaya says unexpectedly, voice almost wistful. Almost. There’s something not quite right about it, but Shizuo’d be damned if he knew what it was.

“Where’s here?”

“Here,” Izaya says enigmatically. “Just here.”

“That’s not very helpful, flea.”

“I didn’t intend to be.”

Izaya leads him in somewhere. Shizuo only knows because he can’t feel the sun on his skin anymore, can hear the hum of cheap electric lights.

Izaya leads him to…a chair? A couch? And there’s a click of porcelain far away.

Izaya presses something warm into his hands. It smells delicately floral, delicate like jasmine.

Tea.

“It’s not sweetened, but only heathens sweeten green tea.” A pause. “Maybe I should have put something in, then.”

“Why am I here?”

“A lot of people come to me, you know,” Izaya says, and there’s a smile that curls through his voice. “Many. They want to end it all but don’t quite have the follow through. Not quite at the place where they can.”

“And what, after an hour with you, they’re ready? What does that have to do with anything?”

Izaya doesn’t answer that, he’s fumbling around with something and there’s then distinctive clack of glass on glass in front of him. Shizuo guesses a cup set on the table, and it smells strongly of almonds.

“There’s cyanide in that glass,” Izaya says, and he doesn’t sound terribly interested. “It’ll probably kill you if you drink it, I'd give it a solid eighty percent chance.” There’s the sound of rustling fabric. “Well, it’s been fun, Heiwajima.”

“What? Where are you going?”

“I have things to do.”

“You took me to your apartment to, what? Kill myself and you’re just going to leave me here?”

“Well. Yes. Don’t you fret, I’ll have your body taken care of if you do choose to go through with it. For all your nearest and dearest will know, you could have started a new life out in the mountains as a disabled bear. Or a crotchety old monk.”

“I don’t want to commit suicide, damn it.”

There’s faint steps coming closer. Quieter than Kasuka’s, but not as soundless as Celty’s.

“What, you wanted me to kill you? Absolve yourself of any wrongdoing?” There’s a delicate finger that reaches out, traces under an empty eye socket, and Shizuo flinches back, and there’s an irritated click of the tongue. “I tried, Heiwajima. You lived, but I still won. That was the final goodbye, ne? You said so yourself.”

“Then why did you take me here?”

“It’s less problematic for me if you kill yourself in an unused apartment than throw yourself on the train tracks. Do you know what sort of delays that causes?”

And Izaya closes the door behind him with a click of the latch, leaving Shizuo alone with a glass of cyanide.


End file.
